No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?

Research in Motion (R.I.M.), the company that brought us the BlackBerry, has been on a roll lately. For a couple of years now, it’s delivered a series of gorgeous, functional, supremely reliable smartphones that, to this day, outsell even the much-adored iPhone.

Here’s a great example of the intelligence that drives R.I.M.: The phones all have simple, memorable, logical names instead of incomprehensible model numbers. There’s the BlackBerry Pearl (with a translucent trackball). The BlackBerry Flip (with a folding design). The BlackBerry Bold (with a stunning design and faux-leather back).

Well, there’s a new one, just out ($200 after rebate, with two-year Verizon contract), officially called the BlackBerry Storm.

The Storm can display a touch-screen Qwerty keyboard, above, or SureType keys.

But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud.

The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touch-screen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touch-screen mania, R.I.M. has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard.

Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like aniPod without a scroll wheel. A Prius with terrible mileage. Cracker Jack without a prize inside.

R.I.M. hoped to soften the blow by endowing its touch screen with something extra: clickiness. The entire screen acts like a mouse button. Press hard enough, and it actually responds with a little plastic click.

As a result, the Storm offers two degrees of touchiness. You can tap the screen lightly, or you can press firmly to register the palpable click.

It’s not a bad idea. In fact, it ought to make the on-screen keyboard feel more like actual keys. In principle, you could design a brilliant operating system where the two kinds of taps do two different things. Tap lightly to type a letter — click fully to get a pop-up menu of accented characters (é, è, ë and so on). Tap lightly to open something, click fully to open a shortcut menu of options. And so on.

Unfortunately, R.I.M.’s execution is inconsistent and confusing.

Where to begin? Maybe with e-mail, the most important function of a BlackBerry. On the Storm, a light touch highlights the key but doesn’t type anything. It accomplishes nothing — a wasted software-design opportunity. Only by clicking fully do you produce a typed letter.

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

It’s no help that the Storm shows you two different keyboards, depending on how you’re holding it (it has a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s).

When you hold it horizontally, you get the full, familiar Qwerty keyboard layout. But when you turn it upright, you get the less accurate SureType keyboard, where two letters appear on each “key,” and the software tries to figure out which word you’re typing.

For example, to type “get,” you press the GH, ER and TY keys. Unfortunately, that’s also “hey.” You can see the problem. And trying to enter Web addresses or unusual last names is utterly hopeless.

Furthermore, despite having had more than a year to study the iPhone, R.I.M. has failed to exploit the virtues of an on-screen keyboard. A virtual keyboard’s keys can change, permitting you to switch languages or even alphabet systems within a single sentence. A virtual keyboard can offer canned blobs of text like “.com” and “.org” when it senses that you’re entering a Web address, or offer an @ key when addressing e-mail.

But not on the Storm.

Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up activating something else in the list.

To scroll a list, you’re supposed to flick your finger across the screen, just as on the iPhone. But even this simple act is head-bangingly frustrating; the phone takes far too long to figure out that you’re swiping and not just tapping. It inevitably highlights some random list item when you began to swipe, and then there’s a disorienting delay before the scrolling begins.

There’s no momentum to the scrolling, either, as on the iPhone or a Google phone; you can’t flick faster to scroll farther. Scrolling through a long list of phone numbers or messages, therefore, is exhausting.

Nor is that the Storm’s only delayed reaction. It can take two full seconds for the screen image to change when you turn it 90 degrees, three seconds for a program to appear, five seconds for a button-tap to register. (Remember: To convert seconds into BlackBerry time, multiply by seven.)

In short, trying to navigate this thing isn’t just an exercise in frustration — it’s a marathon of frustration.

I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.

And that’s before they discovered that the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It can’t get onto the Internet using wireless hot spots, like the iPhone or other BlackBerrys. Verizon’s high-speed (3G) cellular Internet network is now in 258 American cities, but that’s still a far cry from everywhere.

But wait, there’s less. Both of my review Storms had more bugs than a summer picnic. Freezes, abrupt reboots, nonresponsive controls, cosmetic glitches.

My favorite: When I try to enter my Gmail address, the Storm’s camera starts up unexpectedly, turning the screen into a viewfinder — even though the keyboard still fills half the screen. (R.I.M. executives steadfastly refused to acknowledge any bugs. I even sent them videos of the Storm’s goofball glitches, but they offered only stony phone silence.)

It’s all too bad, because behind that disastrous software and balky screen, there’s a very nice phone.

It runs, after all, on Verizon’s excellent cellphone network. If you’re one of the few remaining rich people in this country, you can even use this phone overseas (roaming rates are as high as $5 a minute). The phone features are excellent; calls are loud and clear.

The Storm has voice dialing, copy-and-paste, programmable side buttons, removable battery and a standard headphone jack. You can open and even edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments. Even Mac fans can get in on the action, thanks to a free copy of the Pocket Mac software.

You also get expandable storage; an eight-gigabyte memory card comes in the box. The Web browser is the best yet on a BlackBerry: double-tap to zoom, drag a finger to scroll. The camera is dog slow, but it has a very good flash, a 2X zoom and a stabilizer; it takes decent, if pale, pictures and movies. (And goodness knows, it’s easy to start up. Just enter a Gmail address …)

There’s even GPS, with turn-by-turn directions as you drive ($10 a month extra). The Storm can show voice mail in an Inbox-like list, like the iPhone does ($3 a month extra). The screen (480 x 360 pixels) is bright and beautiful.

Honestly, though, you’ll probably never get that far. When you look at your typing, slow and typo-ridden, and you repair the dents you’ve made banging your head against the wall, you’ll be grateful that Verizon offers a 30-day return period.

How did this thing ever reach the market? Was everyone involved just too terrified to pull the emergency brake on this train?

Maybe R.I.M. is just overextended. After all, it has just introduced three major new phones — Flip, Bold, Storm — in two months, each with a different software edition. Quality-control problems are bound to result; the iPhone 3G went through something similar.

Web rumor has it that a bug-fix software update is in the works. Until then, maybe Storm isn’t such a bad name for this phone. After all — it’s dark, sodden and unpredictable.